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Eight Stages Of Genocide Essay

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Genocide, as defined by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, is the mass killing of a people group “with the intent to destroy the existence of the group”. Even though the term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who yearned for a word to properly describe the atrocities committed against the Jews during World War II, many genocides have taken place previous. One example of a pre-World War II genocide is the Armenian Genocide. The massacre of the Armenian people within the Ottoman Empire was a genocide because it fits within the parameters of the eight stages of genocide.
The first stage of genocide is the classification of the target group, wherein the oppressed are differentiated from the oppressors. The Armenian …show more content…

The Young Turks took power of the Ottoman Empire in 1908 and were seemingly going to be more fair towards the Armenians. But in 1909 an Armenian demonstration for autonomy was disrupted by Ottoman soldiers, informal troops, and civilians. The outbreak became violent- as many as 20,000 Armenians were slaughtered. The Young Turks then took over the Committee of Union and Progress and used their political leverage to begin a campaign for a true Turkish Ottoman Empire in which there would be no other cultures or …show more content…

In the case of the Armenian Genocide, this stage is literal. Turkey, modern day Ottoman Empire, has not admitted to committing genocide against the Armenians. While the majority of the rest of the world recognizes the mass killing of the Armenians as genocide, Turkey does not even allow for that accusation to be brought up. In October of 2015 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Turkish politician Doğu Perinçek had a right to his 2005 statement that the “Armenian genocide is a great international lie,”. While all Turkish governments since the genocide have completely denied the occurrence of the genocide at all, it has been admitted by Turkey that “some” Armenians were killed during the war. This was stated however, as if the Armenians had rebelled against the Ottoman Empire and the results were that the rebels were killed, but none more than

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